“Moving On”
If you’ve used a moving company within the past five years EVER, you’ll have noticed that’ve begun selling the horrendous ordeal as an experience. You’re meant to make new memories. Laugh and live. And ultimately - usually - eat Chinese food directly out of the containers, surrounded by boxes while illuminated by a single candle. Moving is romantic as all get out.
Before this reimagining you’d see moving trucks in commercials but never any portrayal of the people driving them. The trucks were all that mattered. Companies like Mayflower and Atlas and Bekins. I knew the logos and the colors. But, again, nothing about the people. And that was fine.
Now, though…now it’s all about the movers. Usually they’ll be smiling and sweet. Maybe even give one of your kids a piggy back ride across your lawn. They love the hours they’re spending with you. Look at their smiles. They’re fucking stoked.
They’ll stand there with their clean shirts tucked in, freshly pressed pleated khakis, clipboard in hand calmly going through the process with you. The representatives back in the office are much the same. Clean, smiling, combed hair and phone headset on and ready to take your call. They have names like Ryan and Lisa and Sam and Chris. They’re young, alert and just happy to be there. And that’s important to me because I want Lisa and Chris to make sure that Ryan and Sam are taking care of my stuff as if it were their own. Those copies of Milton and Nietzsche I read in college - and haven’t cracked the binding of since - need their care and attention.
I go to sleep on moving day-eve and am relaxed and ready to greet - or be greeted by - one of my new, well-scrubbed and thoroughly deodorized friends-for-the-morning. But right from the start things aren’t what I was expecting.
Firstly, the truck. It’s not clean or sleek or even new. But the specimens of humanity which spill out of the front cab take my breath away.
These men are…unkempt. They look less like Ryan and Sam and more like they’ve eaten Ryan and Sam. Lisa and Chris back in the home office are - I assume - also long dead. Lisa and Chris were stripped of their khakis whipped mercilessly with the Ethernet cables. Their deaths came early and at the speed of T1.
The men I am now dealing with - the ones who ate Ryan and Sam - are desperate and dirty. They’ve been up since before I went to sleep. They smell of smoke, sweat and tears [not their own]. As the morning becomes the afternoon, I become increasingly convinced that their working for a moving company is a cover. An escape. A way to blend in. To be needed but not seen. They are probably wanted by the ICC for a whole host of war crimes committed as very young men during the war in Bosnia or Chechnya.
The disdain they have for me and my stuff [again Milton and Nietzsche] is as noticeable as the scars lining the back of their hands. These are mean men. Monstrous men. They’ve killed and almost been killed. And now they’re expecting a tip.
The end of the day comes and I’m beside myself. I care less about where I am now living than the fact that I’ve survived these beasts. Their leader, Graz [or something], sits me down with a clipboard battered, bruised and cracked by the many skulls it has been used to soften. He tallies the extras [boxes, tape, time, etc.] and instantly the sum I discussed with the dearly departed Lisa and Chris is a memory. It never happened. At least, not to Graz.
The price rises and begins soaring somewhere high above, working its way through the clouds propelled by intimidation. I watch Graz’s fingers - wounded by dirty deeds done dirt cheap - punch numbers into a calculator. If I survive this I’ll be a changed man. I’ll do better, try harder, be nicer. If...just if Graz decides what he wants to charge me and then allows me to live.
If there was justice in the world [uh...no] then these desperados would advertise their services honestly. People might not mind the moving experience being a profoundly upsetting one. They could have their own companies with names like Geneva Convention Moving Company or Dubrovnic Has Fallen Movers or Balkan Tigers Trucking. That way people would know what they were getting and be happy.
Graz seems to tire of the mathematical charade and puts the calculator away without showing me a total. Why would it matter? I’ll pay anything he wants – and do so gladly - just to get him out of my apartment so I can Febreze and cry.